Whatever Happened To The Little Chef?

This week's Marketing Week reports how Little Chef have appointed a new chap as Development Director to introduce a grab and go coffee bar chain. Little Chef was once on every A road and the favourite stop for families and business travelers alike, but things have clearly been in decline for some years. A succession of new owners since the Forte days have failed to revitalise the flagging business and many of the sites have now closed. So what went wrong?

Well as ever, I like to refer back to the marketing mix - the 7 Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, Place, People, Physical Evidence, Process). There are three that spring to mind where they just keep getting it wrong - Product, Price and People.

And how am I remotely qualified to comment you might wonder? Well I worked there for many years as a student and very little seems to have changed...

Product

Let's face it, the food quality at Little Chef is not good enough. "Fresh" omlettes that are pre-packed and heated in a microwave, pancakes that are also pre-prepared and just slapped on a griddle, burgers that are just, well, scary. You really can get better from a van by the side of the road. Whenever anyone asks me what is safe to eat in a Little Chef, the answer is the free lolly - and that will rot your teeth.

Not only is the product quality not good enough, but for many years the menu planning was poor. It has improved recently, but it was always a struggle to find anything remotely healthy to eat.

The environment in the restaurants was also often below what you would expect. Cleaning was left to waiters on the late shift who just want to go home after ten o'clock - so no surprise that vacuuming and (yes it's true) toilet cleaning was of a lousy standard.

If you want a burger, why get out of the car and sit in a dirty restaurant when you can go to a McDonald's drive-through?

This photo was taken by a Taiwanese girl and captioned: "Typical English food." Sadly, she's probably right...

Price

Ask anyone for a comment about Little Chef and the response is, more often than not, "rip off!" The pricing was frankly ludicrous and way above what a customer could get elsewhere. Working on the till at a Little Chef is still one of the most embarrassing episodes of my life - try explaining to an old lady that yes that meal and pot of tea really has come to ten pounds. Angry people just got angrier when they had to remortgage their house to pay for their rubber-like omlette.

People

There's an old cliche about paying peanuts and what you get... Yes OK I did it, but I was a student and it was easy to get holiday work. Now most of the staff are decent, intelligent people, but you also get some less than desirable characters serving you. The introduction of the minimum wage must have hit Little Chef hard - average wages prior to that were around £2.75 an hour. When someone's getting paid that, do you really think they care if your breakfast is cold?

Of course, there's no excuse nowadays with higher wages. However, to work at a Little Chef full-time takes a certain type of personality. You have to not care about people and what they say to you - and I mean really not care. Customers can be very rude (with good reason usually) and can be quite happy to get personal in their comments.

Sometimes though, the rudeness is not justified. I used to work on the A34 near Oxford. When it opened, the restaurant was the first stop after the hell of pre-bypass Newbury. After a trip up from the south coast on a hot summer's day with a tetchy family and with a two hour trawl through Newbury, a driver would take it out on they first person they found: "Good afternoon, welcome to Little Chef..."

And for dessert...

So, a restaurant sells poor food in a dirty environment, served by people who couldn't care less and charges the earth for it. Recipe for success I'd say!

To finish, I'd like to indulge in an anecdote. A woman had queued half an hour to get in on August Bank Holiday Monday - the busiest day of the year. It was hot and the restaurant was packed. After her long wait, she finally got a table, only to immediately get up, storm over to me and declare: "You're a disgrace! It stinks in here! It stinks of... cooking!"

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